Page 35 of Into Darkness (Night Prowler 6)
There was a long, terrible silence. Lumina’s blood was splashed on his hands, his clothing, all over the stone beneath his knees. He was finding it hard to breathe, hard to think, but he knew beyond his fury and panic and crushing sense of loss—was that even rational, to mourn for a woman he didn’t know?—that he was missing something. Something Honor obviously knew, but he didn’t.
Something that caused a faint glimmer of hope to flare in his chest.
It was at that moment that Lumina coughed. Her body was wracked by a deep shudder. She sucked in a ragged breath, and opened her eyes.
Lumina stared up at Honor with a frown of confusion, and Magnus’s heart skidded to a dead stop inside his chest.
With the single most satisfied smile Magnus had ever seen, Honor said, “Happy birthday, Sunshine. Welcome to the first day of the rest of your life.”
Gasping, L
umina touched her chest. She yanked down the collar of her blood-soaked shirt, and stared; the gash that had been pumping blood only seconds before had entirely vanished.
She looked up at Magnus, and he waited to hear what she would say with his heart now pounding like a jackhammer in his chest.
Her lips quirked. On a faint, exhausted sigh, she said, “So, about that drink . . .”
PART TWO
TWELVE
The clipped footsteps that echoed down the corridor leading to the lone cell on the bottom floor of the prison were measured and precise, as regular as the mechanical tick of a time bomb counting down the seconds until doom into the silence.
Four. Three. Two. One.
Never hurried. Never slow. Never a single alteration in pace over all the years the slight, stooped man with silver hair and dead eyes had visited. Just that slow, rehearsed, bride-down-the-aisle-wedding-march approach, joyless and inevitable as death.
Ticktock. Ticktock. Ticktock.
The woman lying in wait for the man with the precise footsteps couldn’t stop the bitter smile that curved the outer corner of her lips. Thursday again, she thought. Nothing if not predictable.
His appearance was the only way she knew which day of the week it was. No clocks or calendars decorated the walls—nothing, in fact, decorated the walls—but once at the beginning of her incarceration, he’d let it slip on his way out that he’d be back to see her next Thursday. From then on she hadn’t needed a calendar to tell her what the day was; she had one in her head.
Today marked the thirteen hundredth Thursday she’d spent in this cell.
From the simple cot that folded down from the wall, she rose to a sitting position and thrust her bare feet into a pair of cotton slippers. Her plain white shift was of the same material, and had no zipper or even a single button. It was one piece, sleeveless, and fell just above her knees. Her captors had never even given her underwear, and she still couldn’t decide if they thought she might somehow be able to use a bra and panties as weapons, if it was a psychological tactic designed to make her feel vulnerable, or if it was simply spite.
Her gut voted for spite.
She folded her hands in her lap, closed her eyes, and inhaled. Listening. Scenting the air. Even three state-of-the-art airlocks and a perfectly seamless lead box couldn’t contain every single atom of nitrogen and oxygen, and a few was all she needed.
Sweat. A stronger odor of smoke than usual. Stress pheromones, sickly sweet like overripe fruit.
Hmm. Doctor Evil’s agitated today.
She hoped someone close to him had died. Painfully.
She lowered herself to the floor and began to do pushups, partly because it was her routine to exercise upon awakening, but mostly because she knew Dr. Evil absolutely hated to be forced to wait for her heart rate to return to normal before he could perform his unwelcome task.
By the time he’d passed through the final airlock and entered her cell, she was up to thirty-six. He stopped and waited by the door, silently watching, as she continued from thirty-seven to one hundred, counting aloud because that really annoyed him, too.
He wasn’t the only one watching. She was always watched, monitored by camera and audio, her every move recorded. She’d long ago become accustomed to it; all sense of modesty had fled along with her sanity, and she didn’t mind that they watched when she ate and slept and showered, watched when she went to the toilet, watched when she cleaned the blood from her thighs when she had her period because tampons had been refused. She even let them watch when she touched herself in bed, because an orgasm was the single thing of luxury or pleasure in her life. And she hoped whoever was watching was disgusted by it, and by her.
It was a small sort of rebellion, but it was all she had.
When she was done with her pushups, she rose and faced the man.
He didn’t look pleased, which was no surprise. The surprise was that he was empty-handed.
